The War at Home

By YAEL GOLDSTEIN

The First Desire
By Nancy Reisman
320 pages. Pantheon. $24.

Any Jew waiting out the 1930s and 40s in Buffalo, New York, can surely be accused of living at the periphery of our people’s history. The characters of Nancy Reisman's The First Desire take this a step further: they cannot even find their way firmly into their own personal histories. There is Irving Cohen, trolling the underbelly of upstate New York, finding women to bed under gentile pretenses, and embittered lesbian Jo Cohen, sinking slowly into a self she hardly understands; there is Goldie Cohen, who has to all but fake her own death to find a life of her own, and dim-witted Celia Cohen, who wanders the world in an aimless daze. Even Sadie, the one seemingly well-adjusted sibling in the Cohen family, with a rich dentist husband and two beautiful daughters, reflects that “it’s all less solid than she expected.” There is surely something true-to-life about these siblings’ elusive identities and their attendant inability to ever really know what they want. Reisman does a masterful job of carving vivid voices and points of view from out of this clan, and there is something almost uncomfortably real about inhabiting characters who hardly inhabit themselves.

The book begins with Goldie’s sudden disappearance. It takes three days for anyone to notice that she’s missing, and by then there’s no trace of her. Sadie is half-certain her sister is dead; Jo suspects that Goldie simply did what Jo herself had always planned to do and escaped; the rest of the family seem oddly unconcerned, except perhaps for Celia, but her thoughts and feelings are opaque to the other characters and the reader alike. Though the story takes off from Goldie’s disappearance, it is hardly the focus of the story. In fact, there is no focus of the story. Though the plot of The First Desire encompasses a war, a depression, a stroke, a missing person, two births, one death, and several romances gone bad, not to mention a genocide, it still somehow manages to be a book in which nothing much happens. Large events are simply the vehicles for personal doubts and reflections. The Holocaust, for instance, impinges on the Cohens mainly through their father Abe, a handsome Russian immigrant who once couldn’t embrace the new world fast enough, but in the wake of tragedy rediscovers his connection to the old. He pores over fading memories, spends every morning in synagogue, and futilely tries to explain to his Buffalo-born mistress Lillian why she, too, is inextricably enmeshed in Europe. One other character, Lillian’s sister-in-law Bertha, is emotionally paralyzed by the mystery of what happened to her relatives in Poland, but for the rest of them the story, like life itself, just meanders slowly on.

The real dissolution of these lives, it is clear, began slightly before Goldie’s disappearance, with the death of their mother. Rachel Cohen, though she never appears on the page, is nevertheless vividly conjured as the sort of woman whose warm, lively, and generous presence fools people into thinking their lives are far richer than they really are. Even going to the market with her, “became a kind of party, apples and beets passing for decoration.” With their mother in their lives, the Cohen children knew how to be themselves, and, more than that, they knew how to connect to one another. In its family dynamic, in the subtle and fascinating smallness of the story’s surface, and the way that the real story burrows deep into inner lives, so that in the end it is not a small work at all, The First Desire is not unlike a Jewish To the Lighthouse.